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Mars Curiosity lands; ready to search for 'ingredients of life'

By Yesenia RoblesThe Denver Post

Posted:
08/05/2012 08:57:51 PM MDT

Updated:
08/06/2012 03:31:43 AM MDT

Larry and Catherine Grampp, of Broomfield, watch a video during a talk about the Mars Curiosity Rover at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on Sunday Aug. 5, 2012. (AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post)

After a journey of about 253 days across space, NASA landed its largest rover, Curiosity, on Mars on Sunday night.

Colorado scientists and enthusiasts, some of whom contributed to the mission, erupted in cheers and applause watching the landing live Sunday night at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

"I think we can breathe now," said the event's host Steve Lee, a scientist from the musuem. "This wasn't expected, to get a full resolution image back yet. What a treat."

Curiosity, a 7-foot-tall rover, was designed, developed and assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.

Curiosity will be on Mars for one Martian year, the equivalent of about 23 months on Earth.

"We are not looking for life," said a Curiosity project scientist through parts of video coverage presented at the museum. "What we are looking for is the ingredients of life."

The success of the ambitious mission, as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says, depended in part on some Colorado companies.

Lockheed Martin designed and built the aeroshell and heat shield designed to protect Curiosity, particularly as it landed on Mars.

"All of these were built here in Waterton Canyon in Denver," said Richard Hund, an engineer with Lockheed Martin, who was also at the museum's event. "One of the challenges in building these shells was the size."

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Hund said many employees had to be trained to help with the labor-intensive job of putting together the large cone-shaped shell that encloses the rover.

The last 7 minutes, dubbed the "7 minutes of terror" as Curiosity enters the Mars atmosphere at temperatures of almost 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, depended upon Lockheed's shells protecting the rover from the heat.

"We can test bits and pieces; we do the best we can," said another engineer who worked on the descent brakes and gearheads, Scott Christiansen, from Sierra Nevada Corp. "But the whole thing we won't know until it does it tonight."

Mark Bailey, the director of business development for the company, said after so much similar work with other clients, including NASA on 11 other trips to Mars, the company wasn't sweating the pressure.

"We're used to it," Bailey said. "We do it basically every two weeks."

Another company out of Boulder also is counting on the safe landing of Curiosity, which carries instruments built by the Southwest Research Institute with cooperation from a university in Germany.

The instrument will allow scientists to measure radiation on Mars for the first time.

United Launch Alliance in Centennial already did its part as well by providing the rocket that launched Curiosity into space last Nov. 26.

Gaytri Amin, an engineer with the Centennial company, said she designed more than 20 trajectories for the launch of the rocket carrying Curiosity — one for each day within the window where conditions could be good for travel.

"The window opened up on the second day, and all that extra work went by the wayside," Amin said.

Though Curiosity is equipped with high-tech gear, the first images scientists received from the rover were gray-scale pictures snapped from a 1-megapixel, hazard-avoidance camera attached to the body of the rover.

Scientists will wait until they determine it is safe to deploy the other cameras and equipment, which could take a few days.

Curiosity facts

• Curiosity was launched to study whether the Martian environment ever had conditions suitable for microbial life.

• The voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million miles.

• The trickiest part of the journey? The landing. Because Curiosity weighs nearly a ton, engineers drummed up a new and more controlled way to set

the rover down.

• The plans for Curiosity called for a series of braking tricks, similar to those used by the space shuttle, and a supersonic parachute to slow it down.

• Engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by cable from a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords are cut and the rocket stage crashes a distance away.

• The nuclear-powered Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to measure dangerous radiation on the surface.

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